It means something like “questionable this thing being doubtful its non-unsytematization.” Finns don’t even really understand it. With 12 umlauted letters, it is probably the word with the most umlauts as well. This Finnish word, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the longest non-compound word in the world. Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän The spelling with the umlaut actually gets German speakers a little closer to the English pronunciation of “Mac.” But in 2007 McDonald’s took away the umlauts, and now Germans have to get boring ol’ Big Macs like the rest of us.
#What does a with umlaut mean mac#
In Germany, a Big Mac used to be a Big Mäc.Īnd the Filet-o-Fish was the Fishmäc. In Hungarian and Turkish the umlauted vowels follow their non-umlauted counterparts. In Swedish and Finnish the umlauted vowels come at the end of the alphabet (…X,Y,Z,Å,Ä,Ö). Then, ü, ö, and ä are treated like ue, oe, and ae, respectively, so that variations on the same name (Müller, Mueller) will be grouped together. In German, the umlaut is ignored for alphabetization purposes, except when it comes to lists of names. How do you alphabetize umlauted vowels? Depends on the language. Sigue is “seegay” but pingüe is “pingway.” 7. In Spanish it indicates that the u should be pronounced in the combination gu which is usually pronounced as g alone. The mark that prevents two adjacent vowels from combining into one syllable is called a “diaeresis” or “trema.” You see it in French ( naïve, Chloë, Noël) and in the pages of the New Yorker (coöperate, reëlection).
We rather casually use “umlaut” to mean “two little dots above a letter,” but not all little dots are umlauts. It is still sometimes written with an e next to the vowel, for example, Muenchen for München, or schoen for schön. Before the two-dot version became the standard in the 19th century, it was usually written as a tiny “e” above the vowel, like so: Since the Middle Ages, umlauted vowels have been indicated in various ways in German. Umlauts weren’t always written as dots above a vowel. Later, the –i plural ending disappeared and a whole bunch of other sound changes happened, but we are left with the echo of that mutated vowel in mouse/mice, as well as in foot/feet, tooth/teeth, and other irregular pairs.
That plural –i pulled the u forward into umlaut. Way, way back in a time before English had branched off from other Germanic languages, plurals were formed with an –i ending. English was also affected by the umlaut mutation.Įver wonder why the plural of “mouse” is “mice”? Blame umlaut. (Start with “ah” for ä and “oh” for ö.) 4. Not working? Trying pinging back and forth: oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-ee … now freeze your tongue position in “ee” and only move your lips back to “oo.” Hold that u sound with your lips though! Good. You should feel the body of your tongue move forward and up in your mouth. Keep your lips completely frozen in u position while you try to say “ee” with the rest of your mouth. Now imagine there’s an i-sound (an “ee”) coming up. Mimicking that mutation process is a great way to learn to pronounce the umlaut. Technically, “umlaut” doesn’t refer to the dots, but to the process where, historically, a vowel got pulled into a different position because of influence from another, upcoming vowel. “Umlaut” is originally the name for a specific kind of vowel mutation. He called it umlaut from um (around) + laut (sound). In 1819 he described a sound-change process that affected the historical development of German. Jacob Grimm was not only a collector of fairy tales (along with his brother Wilhelm), but also one of the most famous linguists ever. The word “umlaut” comes from one of the Brothers Grimm.
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